Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump remains adamant that he never claimed President George W. Bush “lied” to the public to bring the U.S. to war in Afghanistan.
The GOP front-runner told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly he did not call the president a liar before he diverted the conversation to analyzing the Bushes’ relationships.
“I didn’t say lie. I said ‘he may have lied.’ I don’t know. Did he really believe there were weapons of mass destruction? I know that when his father went in and his father actually did something pretty good ’cause he pulled back, he didn’t get into the trap, but I know that [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein was taunting the father ‘you know the Americans, they were cowards.’ He was saying all sorts of things because of the fact — intelligently they pulled back,” Trump said. “I know that and you know that the son loves the father and I think he felt very hurt by it.”
But O’Reilly pushed back at the New York businessman, pointing a Feb. 13 debate performance where Trump also denied calling Bush a liar in 2008 despite records of the interview that prove he said, “For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies.”
Trump would not address O’Reilly’s attempt to hold him accountable for the eight-year-old comment or the denial of it last month. Instead, Trump focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the regret former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he had about supporting the war.
“Look, regardless of what reason we went in, it was a massive, massive, horrible mistake. That’s for sure,” Trump said.
